Fiona McMahon
Connect Three Consultant

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted our jobs and careers in more ways than we may have imagined. It has created uncertainty to our world of work. One option to help us to navigate particularly through these times is career transition support.

Career transition support changes lives – because it’s person-centred, practical and taps into your potential. And when done well, its impact is amazing…

It’s all about you – addressing the loss

Finding out that your job is being made redundant is traumatic. There will be feelings of shock, denial, anger amid plenty of uncertainty. Working on these emotional responses that we all experience is the starting point of career transition support that is done well. By working with you on this loss and uncertainty in a-focused, practical way, your coach helps you to deal with these stresses and strains and to make the psychological and emotional transition through this initial phase.

In my experience, this key aspect of career transition support is crucial in providing a safe foundation before working with you on the nitty gritty of exploring what could be round the corner. I love how this seamlessly uses the research-led practical ideas from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler on the five stages of loss to make sense of emotional responses to change that we experience in life. This can start to make a real practical difference. Career transition support gives hope.

Building on your unique DNA

Then you are able to start to focus with your coach on your journey to explore what might be next. Once we’ve explored this starting point and worked on this, we can begin to look at where your ‘sweet spots’ lie – the things that you absolutely love to do and get a real buzz from. We also explore what your values are, what motivates you and what makes you tick. Career transition support taps into your unique DNA and by working collaboratively with you to help to create your plan and identify possible job areas worth exploring further. All at your pace.

And there’s more. Your coach is on your team. By working with you and supporting you, you may reconnect with a passion from when you were little. Or you may take the chance to create something else, something different, something that resonates with you more strongly than what you’ve been doing more recently.

Promoting yourself

Then there’s working with your coach on the practical steps of creating an achievement focused CV, finding where the (often unpublished) opportunities are, identifying who in your network can give you leads, creating leads, promoting yourself in person, using LinkedIn as your window to the world, preparing for interviews and making the transition to your newly secured role. All while working with you to help maintain your motivation, momentum and resilience during the process. Career transition support secures futures.

For organisations who do this well – it’s fundamentally based on human respect

By providing career transition support to your people, you help to build their confidence and develop them so that they can respond to this unexpected and traumatic change, especially during these challenging times. You demonstrate respect for your people, and show that you value and empathise with them.

In my experience, the organisations that do this best work collaboratively alongside their coaches providing the career transition support to form a seamless team, in a way that suits the culture of the organisation.

Helping their people to transition to whatever’s round the corner is an active, not a passive process. By appreciating the challenges that those whose jobs are being made redundant are going through and by identifying very straight forward and simple ways to support them, you enhance their wellbeing and build their confidence.

Those who are staying within your organisation may experience ‘survivor syndrome’, a guilt associated with having kept their roles whereas their colleagues and friends have lost theirs. Done well, career transition support for colleagues and friends that are leaving can make a positive difference to those remaining in terms of trust, motivation and performance.

Apart from it being the absolute right thing to do from a human respect perspective, you are also enhancing your employer brand and safeguarding your reputation.

Explore more…

If this has sparked your curiosity and you would like to find out more about how we can help your business and your people get the most from our career transition knowledge and expertise then drop me (Fiona) or Shona, our Client Development Director, an email we’ll happily have a conversation with you.